Data Space and pandemic treaty dominate health news

Good afternoon, health colleagues, and welcome to the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) update on Belgian National Day (21 July). It’s full steam ahead for personalised health as the second half of 2022 beckons, writes EAPM Executive Director Dr. Denis Horgan.

Launch of a pilot project for European Health Data Space

The European Commission has announced its decision to choose the consortium led by the French Health Data Hub to set up a pilot project for the European Health Data Space. This project will aim to feed the legislative discussions around the draft regulation proposed by the European Commission on 3 May on the European Health Data Space. The winning consortium will gather sixteen partners, from ten European countries. Its objective will be to address the challenges surrounding access to health data throughout the EU, to open new perspectives to research and innovation.

Europe's artificial intelligence debate heats up

Europeans agree that they want to regulate AI. But they are divided on issues ranging from facial recognition and social scoring to the definition of AI. Each political group of the European Parliament has submitted several hundred amendments, bringing the total to several thousand. The deluge has come equally from the left and the right – and will now have to be reconciled in a summer of negotiations. One of the most controversial topics is on definitions. 

Left-of-center parliamentarians are pushing for a broad general definition of artificial intelligence (AI) rather than accepting a narrow list of AI techniques. Their goal is to make the regulation future-proof. By contrast, the center-right European People’s Party insists on the definition agreed upon at the OECD. The international economics organization set out a series of principles in 2019 that conservative MEPs argue would promote international agreement (including with the US) among democracies about how to build trustworthy AI. 

What practices to prohibit remains divisive. Green MEPs want to ban biometric categorization, emotion recognition, and all automated monitoring of human behavior. These include recommended software that suggest disinformation and illegal content, used for law enforcement, migration, work, and education. 

Parliament gives EU a push to move faster on artificial intelligence 

The European Parliament has adopted a report on artificial intelligence, which sets out a list of demands to secure the EU’s position in AI, and points to research as one of the key means to achieving that goal.

MEPs warn the EU must move quickly to set clear rules for AI if it wants to have a say in the future of the technology. 

“We have the opportunity to set global standards,” said Parliament’s rapporteur for the file, Axel Voss, speaking in the final plenary debate. “If we allow ourselves to lose leadership position, we will resign ourselves to the status of digital colonies subjugated to other regions that don’t share our values.”

The report is the culmination of a year and a half of work by the Parliament’s special committee on AI. It will feed into work on the upcoming AI Act, the first major AI regulation globally, which will set rules for AI uses according to their level of risk.

Calls grow for Europe to launch co-ordinated COVID fightback

The heat is on for Europe to prepare for its third winter in the pandemic — and there’s a growing chorus calling for a bloc-wide strategy.

Countries in Europe have taken different approaches in the pandemic. In the past, that’s caused border closures, travel disruption and confusion among citizens over which rules apply. At times, this has fueled distrust in leaders as public health strategies diverged.

Today, as Europe melts under a heat wave, it’s easy to forget the coronavirus wave that’s also putting patients in hospitals, caused by the Omicron variant’s BA.5 strain. But it’s unlikely to be the last and, as pandemic fatigue deepens, Europe is under pressure to deliver a more unified approach to prepare for what experts fear could be another deadly pandemic winter.

Soaring cases today are a stark reminder of the threats. The World Health Organization Europe office reported close to 3 million new cases last week, driven by the latest Omicron sub-variant — and that’s with limited testing capacities. Hospitalizations have doubled in the last three weeks, and Europe is seeing close to 3,000 people die of COVID-19 every week.

“These numbers paint a picture of the recent past. Looking to and preparing for the future is much more difficult yet must be urgently tackled,” WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge warned on Tuesday.

Kluge urged countries to “re-launch mitigation efforts,” but stopped short of recommending mandatory measures. Countries should boost vaccination rates, especially in at-risk groups, and promote mask wearing indoors and on public transport, Kluge also said, advising “informed individual choices around protection measures.”

Germany is already putting a mask mandate back on the table. Over the weekend, Justice Minister Marco Buschmann revealed that the government was preparing for a tough COVID winter, including making masks mandatory in indoor public spaces.

But, more broadly, Europe’s elected political leaders — already battling the fallout from the war in Ukraine, spiraling inflation and an energy crisis that threatens to tip the region into recession — are showing scant appetite for harsher restrictions that could stoke a popular backlash.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines for developing countries: An equal shot at recovery 

As the roll out of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines begins, this policy brief asks how to ensure vaccines for all. In doing so, it examines the case for multilateral approaches to access and delivery, maps key challenges, and identifies priority actions for policy makers. The absence of a comprehensive approach to ensure vaccine access in developing countries threatens to prolong the pandemic, escalating inequalities and delaying the global economic recovery. 

While new collaborative efforts such as ACT Accelerator and its COVAX initiative are helping to bridge current gaps, these are not enough in circumstances where demand far outstrips supply. Based on the current trajectory, mass immunisation efforts for poorer countries could be delayed until 2024 or beyond, prolonging human and economic suffering for all countries. 

Policy actions to support equitable vaccine access in developing countries include: (i) supporting multilateral frameworks for equitable allocation of vaccines and for crisis response, resilience and prevention; (ii) highlighting the role of development finance; and, (iii) promoting context-driven solutions. 

Why we still need a pandemic treaty

At the World Health Assembly in May, 2022, 194 member states debated amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR), the current global framework for preparing for and responding to health emergencies. Despite meeting fully in person for the first time since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the member states made little progress in proposing solutions for what will be different for the next pandemic. The discussions were consumed by procedural questions, with few proposals for substantive change.

Introduced 53 years ago and last revised in 2005, after the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, the IHR is a legally binding agreement that requires countries to improve their core capacities, including legislation, coordination, and surveillance, to detect and respond to national health emergencies.

The IHR also defines the steps for reporting disease outbreaks to WHO and disease control measures. However, when COVID-19 struck, the limitations of the IHR reporting system became clear.

The current IHR system has little power to ensure governments comply with their responsibilities or report accurately on their core capacities to prepare for and respond to health emergencies.

US data privacy and abortion limits set to collide

The US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal right to abortion is likely to create a clash between state-by-state abortion restrictions and the patchwork of data privacy laws that are being legislated in the absence of a federal privacy law. Even before the 24 June ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, privacy advocates, concerned that data on women seeking abortions could be used to target them, sounded alarms that women should be vigilant in the types of data and content they share with fertility and health apps and through social media. 

They also warned against bringing a phone or other device with location-tracking services to an abortion provider. Although a handful of states including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia have passed data privacy laws, and five others are considering similar measures, experts say it’s not clear how or whether such laws would protect women seeking abortions across state lines. “I think it's going to be an interesting conflict between various state interests, because it's going to be such a patchwork,” said Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. “I am very worried about how data is going to be packaged and used.”

And that is everything from EAPM for now. Stay safe and well, and enjoy your weekend.

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